"I think John Sonsini may be the greatest portrait painter in the country.

That’s because his pictures of working-class men capture essential aspects of their individuality while revealing essential things about the world in which we live.

Sonsini’s portraits raise profound questions about identity — race, class, sexuality — while laying bare the cultural, economic and political underpinnings of the ways we see ourselves, especially as those visions take shape in relationship to others: people with different backgrounds, different upbringings, different dreams."

By David Pagel – 30 January 2020

Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Sadie Benning on their solo exhibition Pain Thing (February 1 - April 26, 2020), curated by Curator-at-Large Bill Horrigan. The exhibition is a single installation consisting of 63 small wood panels grouped into 19 discrete and separately titled sequences that extend through three galleries.

Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Stanya Kahn on her solo exhibition No Go Backs at the Wexner Center for the Arts (January 22 - April 26, 2020), curated by Associate Curator of Exhibitions Lucy I. Zimmerman. The exhibition premieres the artist's video No Go Backs, an intensely visceral, highly compressed work that begins by following two teens, immersing viewers in fragments of their journey.

"Sonsini has painted these same men over and over for the past fifty years, and one has the sense they comprehend and appreciate each other deeply. These are not only paintings but images that facilitate a deeply personal exchange between people whose experiences may be very different, but whose humanity is very much the same."

By Eve Wood – 20 January 2020

"Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s photographs of himself, his friends and his colleagues advance portraiture through layering, fragmentation, confusion and a certain kind of trompe l’oeil. They make us question what we see, how it’s constructed, and encourage us to contemplate the relationship between reality and artifice."

By Tyler Green – 02 January 2020

We are happy to announce that Berlin based Tobias Vielmetter-Diekmann has moved to Los Angeles to join Vielmetter Los Angeles as Senior Director of Development and Technology. Tobias joins the team of Senior Directors Kevin Scholl, Ariel Pittman, and Michael Smoler.

Technology has been an important driver in the gallery’s development from the beginning and Tobias’ role will be to further advance the gallery’s operations by utilizing cutting-edge technological solutions. This will include enhancing our state-of-the-art data management and communications systems, optimizing the gallery’s internal workflow and its digital presence for years to come and thus creating substantial benefits for the gallery’s clients and artists represented.

Most recently, Tobias collaborated with Berlin-based strategic consultant and UX designer Konstantin Haubrok (https://haubrok.co) to redesign the gallery’s brand identity and communication for social media, online platforms and print publications. For the gallery’s move to the new downtown location, they developed a new layout for the gallery webpage, which delivers access from mobile devices and a greatly enhanced opportunity to explore the gallery’s programming, exhibitions, news, and portfolios of artists.

Tobias has been part of the team since the founding of the gallery in 2000, up to now working remotely from Berlin in various capacities including the directorship of the gallery’s former Berlin branch. He developed the gallery’s integrated inventory and address management system and has managed its online presence from the beginning. Tobias has also helped gallery artists with ambitious technology-based productions for exhibitions both at the gallery and in major institutions as well as implementing advanced studio archiving solutions and data management.

Tobias holds a degree in software engineering in addition to a BA in Museum Studies from Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin with graduate studies in Art and Visual History at Humboldt University of Berlin. He has worked as Director at Praz-Delavallade Gallery, Berlin, and assisted the Curator’s Office of the Neue Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Tobias is the founder of the inventory and contact management software WrkLst (https://wrklst.art), which offers cloud based integrated data management solutions for commercial galleries, artists, collectors, and museums and is being used by a wide range of private and institutional customers worldwide.

"A pirate wench with the head of Martin Luther King Jr hangs upside-down from the ceiling, her bosom partially exposed, on the stand of Mitchell-Innes & Nash at Art Basel in Miami Beach. The ghostly figure also leaks a chocolate substance mixed with the paint thinner Floetrol. Altogether, the statue A Vessel in a Vessel in a Vessel and So On (2007), by the artist Pope.L, is a comment on the toxicity of black stereotypes."

07 December 2019

"Titled The Shape of Shape, it was chosen by the New York painter Amy Sillman, who orchestrated a dense installation that compared and contrasted work by around 70 artists. The result was a visual feast that might also be read as a reminder to MoMA’s brainy curators that pleasure is its own form of knowledge."

By Roberta Smith – 06 December 2019

"Sillman’s eye is sharp and witty. She makes brilliant, often hilarious connections between objects that may be wildly disparate. As part of the opening gambit at the new MoMA, Sillman chose seventy-one works from the institution’s collection, using shape as her conceptual lodestar. Walk around the small, anxiously stuffed gallery and you will recognize aspects of Sillman’s own work: lumps, lines, cuts, and lots of awkward, bulbous things."

By Nicole Eisenman – December 2019

Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Mickalene Thomas on her appointment as the 2020 Presidential Visiting Fellow in Fine Arts at the Yale School of Art.

Stavros Niarchos Foundation Dean Marta Kuzma notes: “We are honored to have Mickalene Thomas join the Yale School of Art faculty throughout 2020 as a black feminist artist whose practice contributes to the evolving conversation around post-blackness, sexuality and power. She is a fierce mentor who has supported emerging queer black artists, through fostering critical conversations and assisting with professional development.”

"When Mickalene Thomas was chosen to create art for the Leimert Park station of Metro’s Crenshaw/LAX line, she looked to iconic elements of the community’s landscape — including the Art Deco-era tower of what is now the Vision Theatre — then collaged them. She wanted residents to recognize the images in the piece."

By Dorany Pineda – 11 November 2019

"Since the late 1970s, Pope.L has worked in performance, video, drawing, installation, sculpture and teaching, troubling facile readings of the machinations that govern the relationships between race, labour, capitalism and materiality. His practice traverses genres in an attempt to reckon with everything from the tenuousness of Black masculinity in public space to the lingering economic effects of post-industrial America."

By Jessica Lynne – 20 October 2019

By Jonathan Griffin – 09 October 2019

"Aguayo’s visual lexicon works because he productively stymies the logic of his own forms and colors before they reach a formulaic point of exhaustion by throwing in red herrings—as with the yellow arches or surprise pops of color painted onto the sides of the raw canvases. The revelation of process, the “editing” of the image made visible, eschews the self-assured heroism of the old guard of abstract painting while upholding doubt as the necessary catalyst of—perhaps the true subject of—experimentation."

By Kathryn Poindexter-Akers – 02 October 2019

Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Rodney McMillian on Brown: Videos from The Black Show, a solo exhibition at The Underground Museum (October 5, 2019–February 16, 2020). The exhibition is comprised of video works presented in the artist's major exhibition The Black Show at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia (2016).

Opening night will feature a performance by jazz musician, Alice Smith and a DJ set by Novena Carmel. The event is free and open to the public.

Ruben Ochoa is one of five artists selected for the U.S. General Services Administration's Art in Architecture public art program at the San Ysidro Land Port of Entry at the US/Mexican border.

Ochoa’s work entitled “Mis Marcadores” takes its name and inspiration from conchas, a type of Mexican sweet bread (pan dulce) and the bread stamp, or “marcador”, that is used to create the bread’s signature crunchy shell-like pattern. Pan dulce has a special place in Mexico’s gastronomic landscape and is commonly enjoyed as an everyday breakfast snack (akin to doughnuts) and during the observance of special occasions such as the Day of the Dead.

Hayv Kahraman is one of fifteen artists selected to participate in OVERRIDE | A Billboard Project, a citywide public art initiative presented by EXPO CHICAGO and the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE), displayed throughout Chicago’s City Digital Network (CDN). Kahraman's work will be projected through September 29.

"Known in part for its logistical challenges and athletic intensity, this solo performance, along with other early crawls, was meant to draw attention to the conditions of have-not-ness, homelessness, the forced surrender of verticality, the danger of proximity to the street and the potentially suspect movement of blackness/maleness in public space."

By Mandy Harris Williams – 20 September 2019

"Pope.L: Instigation, Aspiration, Perspiration, an ambitious triumvirate of exhibitions by the Public Art Fund, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Museum of Modern Art, erupts Saturday with Conquest, his biggest group performance, involving some 140 to 160 people representing the city’s diversity in every manner from race and socioeconomics to range of mobility."

By Natasha Gural – 19 September 2019

Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Shana Lutker on her installation in this year's CURRENT: LA, Los Angeles' public art triennial (October 5–November 3, 2019), themed "Food." Titled "Contemporary Museum of Temporary Containers (CMTC)" and located at Valley Plaza Recreation Center in North Hollywood, the installation is composed of single-use takeout containers painted a single color and organized by size, shape, or former contents. The work encourages creative reuse and considers the limits of sustainability and recycling at a critical juncture of environmental responsibility.

"Inaugurating what will be an annual commission for the Met’s facade, Ms. Mutu is placing bronze statues of seated women in four of the niches, from Sept. 9 through Jan. 12. Crowned, blinded and gagged by highly polished discs, and born of traditions both European and African, these graceful, commanding figures will change the face of the museum, literally and figuratively. As a test run suggests, they will sometimes reflect sunlight with spooky intensity, in what Ms. Mutu calls “a stunning message from beyond.” It is testament to her belief that, like street theater or religious rituals, art can nudge viewers toward congregation."

By Nancy Princenthal – 05 September 2019

"It is not Genevieve Gaignard’s brazen truths, stinging though they are, but her subtle pricks that linger worryingly— Remember This House (2019) places a portrait of Ava Gardner (as well as other pale relations) on a family photo shelf, and a stuffed German Shepherd dutifully standing guard by the patriarch’s chair—contempt and violence neatly wrapped then delivered to your door."

By Max King Cap – 03 September 2019

"For the first time since the Met opened its Beaux-Arts building on Fifth Avenue, in 1902, works of art will grace the niches of its exterior. On Sept. 9, the museum inaugurates its Façade Commission with a quartet of seven-foot-high bronzes by the Kenyan-born artist Wangechi Mutu (pictured), who divides her time between Nairobi and New York City. The female figures are reminiscent of caryatids, seen in both ancient Greek temples and in the centuries-old carvings of the Luba people from Central Africa."

30 August 2019

"Four six-and-a-half-to-seven-foot-tall bronze female figures—part African queens, part cyborgs—will take up position in the building’s exterior niches facing Fifth Avenue that have stood empty for more than 100 years. The sculptures are the work of the Kenyan-born artist Wangechi Mutu, and this homecoming, if you can call it that, carries all manner of poignant historical, political, and redemptive narratives along with it. An institution founded on the appropriation of antiquities and a Eurocentric view of culture is being turned on its head."

By Eve MacSweeney – 27 August 2019

Commissioned by the San Francisco Arts Commission, Liz Glynn presents a permanent public art installation "Terra-Techne" located at Harvey Milk Terminal 1 at the San Francisco International Airport.

"Terra-Techne" is intended as a monument to technological innovation and organic connectivity. The artwork consists of six suspended “tectonic plates”, each representing a different continent, from which an upside-down landscape projects from the underside of the continents while an abstract circuit board extrusion sits on the top.

Mary Kelly: Selected Works, a solo exhibition by Mary Kelly, opens at the Weatherspoon Art Museum (WAM) in Greensboro, NC on September 28, 2019 and will remain on view through December 8, 2019. Kelly is currently a Falk Visiting Artist at WAM. This exhibition is organized by Dr. Emily Stamey, Curator of Exhibitions.

For more information, please visit the museum's website.

Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Wangechi Mutu on her commission for The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Fifth Avenue facade niches to inaugurate a new annual artist commission series.

For more information, please visit The Met's website.

"Working at the intersection of race, gender, identity, memory, and popular culture, Gaignard’s work tackles broad social dynamics through the intimate lens of personal experience. As a mixed-race woman, she was and remains deeply affected by a feeling of invisible in-betweenness, and has been motivated by the desire to explore, explicate, and extrapolate from her own experiences some larger truths about the American experiment."

By Shana Nys Drambot - 16 August 2019

"Jones operates according to an unstated social-scientific law, that power is neither created nor destroyed. He does the work of transformation, reassigning power from sources steeped in biased convention, where it had a corrosive effect on humanity, to new vehicles of thought and sensual encounter. Defiance has rarely looked this handsome."

By Leah Ollman – 11 August 2019

"Watching Roden construct these collages on the fly is fascinating and offers insight into his process and multi-faceted practice. Numerous times, I wanted to stop the projection to sit longer with his compelling combinations. What is magical about Roden’s exhibitions is not only the power of his painted compositions, but how the myriad elements fit together creating a unified whole."

By Jody Zellen – 08 August 2019

"Indeed, one the most disorienting and successful aspects of the exhibition is that by entering the space we immediately become part of a scene. Surrounded by these familiar-unfamiliar anthropomorphic creatures imploring us that “getting emotional waste out of your gym bag is a nightmare of cognition,” we uncomfortably recognize ourselves as players. Following the cue of the cento, whereby the “higher,” authoritative source is subverted through collage, Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley wear our subconscious social tyrannies as drag and push them to the point of pantomime, giving us the distance to realize their problematics, then perhaps even the space to laugh at them. Much like an actor realizing that he is not truly Macbeth but merely imitating his words and actions, perhaps a way of discovering ourselves in this overloaded haze of information is to embrace the fact that we are merely playing the roles we’re given. Underneath it all we are fragmented, uncertain, and human."

By India Nielson – 08 August 2019

"In the engaging photography, collage, assemblage, and sculptural installation work of Genevieve Gaignard, anything and everything can be a self-portrait. This frequently includes actual self-portraiture but also expands to appropriate and transform arrayed objects of domestic and cultural spaces and images culled from popular media into reflections and embodiments of something both intimate and universal in the life of the artist. Empathetic vignettes for wall, nook, and floor space, in presenting heightened-reality versions of ordinary environments, convincingly evoke what could be read as not only archetypal but also as believably the artist’s own memories."

By Shana Nys Dambrot – 07 August 2019

On September 21, Public Art Fund will present Conquest, Pope.L’s largest group performance to date. Inspired by the artist’s iconic crawls in which he dragged his body across the urban landscape, Conquest will navigate the streets of Downtown Manhattan continuing the irreverent tradition of his more than 30 performative works that have taken place since 1978. In this iteration, a group of 100+ volunteer participants that reflect the cultural and demographic diversity of New York City will crawl in relay a nearly 1.5 mile-long route from the well-to-do West Village to the new granite steps of Union Square via the triumphal arch of Washington Square Park. In choosing to give up their physical privilege, participants satirize their own social and political advantage, creating a comic scene of struggle and vulnerability to share with the entire community. Public Art Fund's presentation will be the artist’s most ambitious yet, putting on full display the power and contradictions of collective expression.

Conquest is the free, outdoor component of Pope.L: Instigation, Aspiration, Perspiration – a trio of complementary exhibitions organized by Public Art Fund, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Museum of Modern Art. Addressing the artist’s boundary-breaking practice, the three-institution season of Pope.L’s work utilizes both public and private spaces, and will address issues and themes ranging from language and gender, to race, social struggle, and community.

Pope.L: Conquest is curated by Public Art Fund Director & Chief Curator Nicholas Baume, with Public Art Fund Assistant Curator Katerina Stathopoulou.

"At her Brooklyn studio, Thomas explained to correspondent Nancy Giles it's that validation – demanding to be seen – that is part of what Manet intended by including his black model in Olympia: "It's about them looking out at you, and demanding to be seen, demanding the validation – Look at me, I'm here, I exist, I'm present."

By Kay Lim – 14 July 2019

"I think my paintings emerge through color. They emerge through a few different things, but significantly through the language of color and what is happening at the moment on the palette. The colors are almost the domino effect of going through a painting. One leads to the next, edges between colors interact in a way that inspires me onto the next passage or mixing of colors. I spend a lot of time mixing colors on my palette before I even put them on the surface. Mixing is a constant throughout the process, the jumble of ideas that flow through color affects my relationship to them, and how they react with each other, and that always surprises me. They don't do one thing. They're full of surprises."

By Kristin Farr – July 2019

With the opening of two additional exhibition spaces in our downtown location, Vielmetter Los Angeles is expanding the gallery in downtown Los Angeles to 24,000 sqf of exhibition space. We are closing the Culver City space as of July 6 and will be open by appointment until July 30.

Please note our new address and phone number below:

1700 S. Santa Fe Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90021
+1 213 623 3280

Our next opening will take place on Saturday, July 13, with a solo exhibition of Steve Roden’s work at the downtown gallery.

Commissioned by Studio Voltaire, Rand/Goop (July 5–October 6) is a new large-scale installation at Studio Voltaire by Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley and marks the artists’ first institutional exhibition in London.

In Rand/Goop, the artists have created a circular narrative for six totemic video sculptures. The protagonists, all performed by Reid Kelley, speak in pithy and often capricious four–line cento poems. The contents are drawn entirely from two sources. Appraisals of Russian–American writer and philosopher Ayn Rand’s ‘Objectivism’ philosophies – limited only to evangelist scholars of her work – are spliced with titles of articles listed on the website of Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle, beauty and wellness brand Goop.

"This fall, Manhattan’s most prestigious contemporary art spaces unite to celebrate the career-to-date of the renowned (and underappreciated) artist known as Pope.L.

Beginning October 10, each venue––MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Public Art Fund––will simultaneously host one component of an exhibition titled “Pope.L: Instigation, Aspiration, Perspiration.” The show, collectively, is a mid-career retrospective that connects the artist’s past (especially his incendiary interventions known as crawls, which literally feature the artist crawling along the ground) with two new commissions."

By Clayton Schuster – 25 July 2019

"Now in her late fifties, Roberts clearly feels a sense of responsibility towards the next generation. As someone who creates images, she is engaged with how black boys have been represented. Works in the exhibition such as After Stephen, Ulysses and Give It a Try analyse the way damaging stereotypes created by the media are internalized by youths."

By Charlotte Jansen – 25 June 2019

"Portraiture has, since, remained at the heart of Raffi’s practice. However, far from traditional portrait painting techniques that situate the subject against a plain and unobtrusive background, his approach delights in the embellishment and ornamentation of every aspect of the painting, incorporating elements like huge, vibrant hothouse plants and swirling patterns. As he says: 'My paintings are generally known for their texture and materiality. Variation and experimental paint handling are a huge part of the process. Often there is some form of vivacious patterning, in the form of clothes or wood grain or plants, or maybe all three.'"

By Rebecca Irvin – 07 June 2019

"Roberts approaches collage with the compositional skills and strong opticality of a trained painter who first learned to draw hands and feet as a child by studying paintings by da Vinci and Michelangelo in her family bible. Her visually intense works are constructed in a devotional way that resonates with the viewer in ways similar to religious masterpieces because she felt called to create them. This politically powerful exhibition is not easy to contemplate, nor should it be, because the source content is so disturbing."

By Lita Barrie – 05 June 2019

"The show reaches its apotheosis outdoors, where Nicole Eisenman’s wild Procession struggles on, rain or shine. One huge, dark-skinned man hauls another, who prostrates himself on the bed of a square-wheeled wagon. A cymbal player rides on the back of a crawling slave. More humanoid figures trail behind, sprouting strange growths, effusions, ropes and sticks — a parade of the malformed but dogged. There’s something oddly hopeful about this shambling spectacle, a sense that the journey is cruel and comical, but the destination clear."

By Ariella Budick – 04 June 2019

Liz Glynn is included in Bold Tendencies' rooftop summer program (May 30 – September 21, 2019) in London with her project Unearthed Underground.

Unearthed Underground is a biomorphic network of tunnels spread over the Bold Tendencies' rooftop, some 22m wide and 15m long. The form of the network is taken from Joseph Bazalgette’s original London sewer system, tracing its tunnel network as it converges across London. Glynn’s installation uproots and re-casts this network onto the roof of the car park. The installation is marked by traces of the sewer's curious history: an inverted dinner party scene nodding to the three-hundred person banquet inaugurating the system, and a lost ceramic slipper from the Queen's parade through the tunnels. As a teenage punk in the 1990s, Glynn watched as indie and punk were subsumed by capitalism and now questions whether an "underground" is still possible under the regime of global capitalism. Inspired by the literature of Dostoyevsky, Victor Hugo and CS Lewis - places where the underground represents a darker, fantastic and utopian space - Glynn is equally concerned with historical cases of those members of society operating literally and figuratively in the shadows below ground. The curving forms of the tunnels represent a time before rational urban planning was introduced; in Victorian London, straightening and widening the crocked streets was considered part of a broader effort at moral reform targeting the lower classes. Glynn likens the act of uprooting this sewer – which doubles as a circulatory system – to the current political climate, where the festering discomforts plaguing a society can no longer be ignored.

"Outside, on the terrace, is Nicole Eisenman’s show-stopping Procession (2019), a motley parade of bronze, fibreglass and plaster figures, some of whom will slowly disintegrate in the summer rain. A jet-black giant pulls a cart atop which his pasty pal crouches, doggie-style, awaiting occasional puffs of smoke from his gaping anus. A faceless figure with trashcan lid cymbals seems unfazed by the farts in his face, or the cart’s bumper sticker, which inquires, ‘HOW’S MY SCULPTING? CALL 1-800-EAT-SHIT’. (The answer is very good.) Each figure in this farcical tableau finds dumb, flatulent pleasure in the heavy load it bears – a lesson, perhaps, on how to handle life’s burdens.

Few living artists are as original as Eisenman."

By Evan Moffitt – 20 May 2019

"Sublime is certainly not a word I’d use for the excellences of Nicole Eisenman’s sculptural contribution. Spectacular is, particularly in the context of this anti-spectacle Biennial. Installed on the sixth floor terrace over the High Line, her shambolic tableaus of lurching figures in plaster, metal and Fiberglass embody the exhibition’s history-conjuring, identity-expanding, form-scrambling tendencies, and projects them loud, with a rude anarchic belch of a kind that’s otherwise missing from the show."

By Holland Cotter – 16 May 2019

Organized by Wassan Al-Khudhairi, Chief Curator, with Misa Jeffereis, Assistant Curator, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis presents Paul Mpagi Sepuya's first major museum survey (May 17 – August 18, 2019).The artist’s first monograph will be published by CAM for this exhibition, featuring contributions by Grace Wales Bonner, fashion designer; Malik Gaines, writer, performer, associate professor and director of undergraduate studies at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts; Lucy Gallun, assistant curator of the department of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Ariel Goldberg, novelist, poet, and essayist; Evan Moffitt, writer, critic, and associate editor of Frieze; and Ikechukwu Onyewuenyi, writer and curatorial assistant at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

"There’s no better example of the diversity of this year’s biennial than Wangechi Mutu.

Not just because of who she is, a Kenya-born art star who splits her time between Nairobi and New York, but also because of the way her practice blends painting, immersive installations, performance, video, and other media."

By Ted Loos – 10 May 2019

"In her mixed-media works, artist Deborah Roberts acknowledges the syncretic nature of black female identity. Debunking societal definitions of ideal beauty and dress, as well as stereotypes of social media, she questions the construction of race and the racializing gaze endemic to Western culture. Her collages and text-based works not only articulate a critique of accepted typologies of the unified self but also affirm the untold value of difference."

By Roxana Marcoci – Spring 2019

"I’ve always embraced this idea of dancing with the personal and the historical in my work. I’ve used references to a number of from artists from that era—Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, Jackson Pollock, Stuart Davis, and so on. My plan is not to get at what each individual artist or work means to me; it’s a formal decision more than anything else. For me, it’s like the way I choose a paint brush—it’s a kind of tool that I’m reactivating in my own language. My plan is not to reveal them directly; it’s about hopefully finding ways to transform them in ways that people are going to feel but not necessarily recognize."

By Taylor Dafoe – 10 April 2019

"In a statement, Eisenman said:

I’m happy to know the fountain will be situated in a place where people are likely to hang out and enjoy some leisure time. [...] I look forward to seeing kids climbing on the sculptures and this piece integrating into the fabric of life in the Fens.

The Münster version of Eisenman’s fountain was so popular in the German city that locals set about raising €800,000 ($900,000) to make the work permanent."

By Benjamin Sutton – 09 April 2019

"Nicole Eisenman’s large-scale outdoor sculpture Grouping of Works from Fountain will be permanently installed at the redeveloped 401 Park building in the Fenway neighborhood of Boston in late spring. The work is an iteration of Eisenman’s Sketch for a Fountain, which made its international debut at Skulptur Projekte Münster in 2017."

09 April 2019

"Throughout her three decades of drawing, painting, and printmaking, Eisenman has patchworked a world from every possible art-historical mode of figuration, bending styles and techniques easily, and often comically, to her will. In her wildly varied body of work, a sensitively observed queer morphology surfaces."

By Johanna Fateman – April 2019

Organized by Anne Ellegood, senior curator at the Hammer Museum, Hammer Projects: Yunhee Min (March 28 – October 27, 2019) adapts the vibrant abstract imagery of her recent approach to painting to the steps of the lobby staircase, in the first Hammer Project to be oriented to the floor rather than the walls. Min completely alters the surface of the stairs themselves, while also making subtle modifications to the walls and lighting in the lobby to underscore how context impacts experience and enhance the visitors’ awareness of the architecture.

"Ms. Mutu, a Kenyan-American artist known for her sculpture, film and performance work, will create a collection of sculptures for the niches in the museum’s facade. This will be the first time that art has been displayed on Richard Morris Hunt’s 1902 facade. The sculptures will be on view from Sept. 9 to Jan 12, 2020."

By Peter Libbey – 23 March 2019

Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Nicole Eisenman on her inclusion in the 58th Venice Biennale. The artist has been represented by the gallery since 2007 and will present works in the central exhibition May You Live In Interesting Times, curated by Ralph Rugoff. Works include Dark Light (2017) and Heading Down River on the USS J-Bone of an Ass (2017).

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to announce its representation of Deborah Roberts. The artist's inaugural exhibition with the gallery will open in April 2019 at our downtown location.

Deborah Roberts (b. 1962) lives and works in Austin, TX. Roberts makes collages using photographs, magazine clippings, and images from the internet, with a unique visual language evoking African-American womanhood to explore the subjects of beauty, identity and politics.

Roberts is the recipient of The Anonymous Was a Woman award was presented to Roberts in 2018. Forthcoming group exhibitions include ‘Cut and Paste: 400 Years of Collage', Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK (2019) and ‘Plumb Line: Charles White and the Contemporary', Californian African American Museum (CAAM), Los Angeles, USA (2019). Selected exhibitions include: 'Deborah Roberts: The Evolution of Mimi', Spelman Museum, Atlanta, Georgia, USA (2018); 'Reclamation! Pan-African from the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection', Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, Virginia, USA (2018); 'Talisman In The Age Of Difference', Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, UK (2018); 'Legacy of the Cool: A Tribute to Barkley L. Hendricks', MassArt, Boston, Massachusetts, USA (2018);' Constructing Identity in America (1766-2017)', Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey, USA; ‘Fictions, Studio Museum of Harlem', New York, New York, USA (2017); 'I know why the caged bird sings', Carver Museum, Austin, Texas, USA (2016); 'Gently Fried', MACC, Austin, Texas, USA (2015); 'The House on Mango Street', National Mexican American Museum, Chicago, Illinois, USA (2015).

Roberts' work is in the collections of Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; 21c Museum Hotels, Louisville, Kentucky; The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Saratoga Springs, New York; Block Museum of Art, Evanston, Illinois; Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), Miami, Florida; LACMA, Los Angeles, California; Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, New Jersey; Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas; and Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, Ohio. She was a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Grant in 2016.

Pope.L is included in Arty's list of The Most Influential African-American Artists.

"It’s never what you expect—Pope.L’s performances, installations, drawings, and paintings often play in the edge of the absurd to tackle weighty issues in society."

By Christopher Y. Lew, Nancy and Fred Poses Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art – 25 February 2019

Mickalene Thomas is included in Arty's list of The Most Influential African-American Artists.

"Thomas views herself as a painter, but all of her paintings begin with photographs and studies of her subjects—family, friends, former lovers, her partner—often set against stylized backdrops of living-room interiors like those of her childhood. Thomas’s paintings are historical interventions that trace intimate relationships between her practice, the formal radicality of modernism, and its outright plunder of Africa."

By Andrea Andersson, The Helis Foundation Chief Curator of Visual Arts, Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans – 25 February 2019

Curated by Jenny Gheith (Assistant Curator of Painting and Sculpture at SFMOMA), New Work: Rodney McMillian (February 9 – June 9, 2019) at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art marks the artist's first solo museum presentation on the West Coast. In this exhibition, McMillian brings together his long-standing interest in the representation of the American landscape with an exploration of home as a place and a state of mind.

New Work: Rodney McMillian features a painted abstract panorama spanning the entirety of the gallery, paired with a soundscape interweaving iconic 1980s songs performed by McMillian and the voice of a social advocate proposing radically new language and polices around the condition of homelessness. This immersive installation questions the political systems that promise freedom and equality for all, and highlights the power of the individual to affect hope and create change.

Mary Kelly's site-specific project for Desert X titled Peace is the Only Shelter returns to the Cold War intervention of Women Strike for Peach, a group formed in 1961 to protest against nuclear weapons testing in the Mojave Desert.

The project description reads: A long period of research led Mary Kelly to repurpose Cold War–era peace activism, in this case the anti-nuclear Women Strike for Peace (WSP), formed in 1961. This feminist group initiated lobbies, petitions, vigils, and demonstrations against nuclear testing. Between 1945 and 1992, the United States conducted more than 1,000 nuclear tests, mostly in the desert Southwest. The artist notes, “Although the radical peace initiatives of women in the early post-war period have been largely forgotten, the action-oriented interventions of the Women Strike for Peace set a precedent for the non-hierarchical politics of second-wave feminism, as well as the many prominent protest movements currently underway.” This counter-history takes on renewed significance amid today’s escalated tensions worldwide. A central feature of Kelly’s similarly public intervention is the so-called Doomsday Clock, whose hands tick closer to midnight as militarism rises and humanity inches closer to self-destruction. The allegory in Peace is the Only Shelter is reshaped as a bus shelter, itself a representative timetable. The intervention in public space calls attention to vestiges of the Cold War in our contemporary context, employing slogans from the WSP, where normally there would be advertisements, and cartographies of military expansion in the California desert, where there would be routes and schedules.

Locations:

531 S. Palm Canyon

33.815465, -116.546812

457-467 S. Indian Canyon Drive

33.816646, -116.545421

Southwest corner of Ramon Road and S. Indian Canyon Drive.

33.815720, -116.545957

"In Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley’s collaborative and often funny works, historical events are rendered as featherlight webs of consequences. For this series of paintings, photographs, and sculptural installations (many of which featured the characters—some historical, some invented—that populate their video In the Body of the Sturgeon, 2017, also on display here), the duo struck a more restrained tone, knitting together histories of settler colonialism, the sociosexual politics of naval life, and President Harry S. Truman’s deployment of the atomic bomb."

By Andy Campbell – February 2019

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects is pleased to announce the opening of our new exhibition space in downtown Los Angeles. Spanning the entire length of 1700 South Santa Fe Avenue, the 11,000 sf warehouse will host the gallery’s most ambitiously scaled exhibitions and provides additional space for both a screening and reading room. It will be used as a second exhibition space in addition to our Culver City gallery. The gallery design was developed in collaboration with TOLO Architecture and Anderson Studio.

The gallery will open during Frieze LA with a preview on Friday, February 15, 2019, and will open to the public on Saturday, February 16. The inaugural exhibition will feature new and historic works by artists from the gallery’s roster: Edgar Arceneaux, Sadie Benning, Andrea Bowers, Kim Dingle, Sean Duffy, Nicole Eisenman, Charles Gaines, Karl Haendel, Stanya Kahn, Mary Kelly, Rodney McMillian, Wangechi Mutu, Ruben Ochoa, Pope.L, Amy Sillman, and Nicola Tyson. The inaugural exhibition will be followed by solo exhibitions of new work by Arlene Shechet, Deborah Roberts, Sam Levi Jones, Genevieve Gaignard, Andrea Bowers, Shana Lutker, and Liz Glynn.

The downtown gallery is located at 1700 S Santa Fe Avenue, just south of the 10 freeway. Limited parking is available on the north parking lot adjacent to the building. Visitors to the opening are encouraged to use ride sharing services.

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to announce its representation of Paul Mpagi Sepuya. The artist's inaugural exhibition with the gallery will open in 2020.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya (b. 1982) is a Los Angeles-based artist working in photography. His work focuses on the production of portraiture in the artist’s studio as a site of homoerotic social relations, and the potential of blackness in the space of the “dark room.” His work emerged within the queer zine scene of the 2000s, he became known for his 2005 ¬– 2007 zine series “SHOOT” and first monograph “Beloved Object & Amorous Subject, Revisited” (2008).

Most recently his work has been included in “Being: New Photography 2018” at the Museum of Modern Art, solo museum exhibition “Double Enclosure” at FOAM Amsterdam and “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon” at the New Museum. Other solo exhibitions include “Dark Room” at Document, Chicago (2018), “Dark Room” at team (bungalow) (2017), Los Angeles and “Figures, Grounds and Studies” at Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York City (2017). His first museum survey in the United States will open May 2019 at CAM St Louis. Sepuya’s work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney and Guggenheim Museums, The Studio Museum in Harlem and MOCA Los Angeles, among others.

"For some artists, MASS MoCA’s iconic Building Five would be a daunting space to fill. The length of a football field, the 30,000 square-foot former textile mill is the nation’s largest free-standing gallery, and the centerpiece of one of its most prestigious museums. But for Liz Glynn ’03, a Boston-born, Los Angeles-based artist known for ambitious projects like attempting to literally rebuild Rome in a day, it was the ideal setting for a new work.

By Samantha Culp – January/February 2019